A few quick notes before heading out again today – sorry for the briefness. First up – Halo Babies has posted a special E3-related strip today. Poor Cortana!

Mr. Wu is gone. So is the rest of the HBO staff. Doesn’t mean they’re completely ignoring this site while at E3, but they’re going to be very busy trying to squeeze the last drop of info from Sketch and Frankie.

I know you’re jealous, but don’t make a mess of the house, willya? Thanks!

Okay, that’s it for me. Time to pack up and head to the airport – though I won’t be landing in LA for another 8 hours. (Gotta love travel times.) Almost all the rest of the HBO admin staff is already there for E3, so news coverage will be pretty sparse for a bit. We’ll do our best, however – and for a taste of what’s there that might be of interest to Bungie fans, check out this quick forum post from mnemesis.

Well, it’s not working out like I’d expected… but yeah, we’re still tweaking. The Movie Peer Review Rating System hasn’t passed a film since May 8 – but I’ve taken to looking at the ‘near misses’, and I’ve got a pair for you to watch today. Bunker 27 is an upcoming Machinima series which looks to be following in RvB’s footsteps – their trailer is 9.1 mb, 1:41 long, and shows potential. (WMP9 or QuickTime.) The Noobs, Experts, and In Between trailer is a short (sub-one-minute) vid that makes use of Halo Resolution sprites and came off pretty funny to me. (Several of the reviewers thought there was too much text to read.) This one’s 3.7 mb, and also in WMP9 or QuickTime. And we’ll keep working on the MPRRS to make it more consistent. (Let’s be clear – I’m not saying it needs to be ‘dumbed down’; I LIKE the fact that the reviewers take the quality issue seriously. I AM saying, however, that the guidelines we’ve given reviewers are nebulous enough that interpretations vary pretty widely. The Bunker 27 trailer was reviewed by 10 people, and passed by 8 of those. One of the two non-passing scores was dropped in our scoring algorithm – but the other was enough to bring the overall score below passing. I’d like to avoid this sort of situation in the future.)

Yesterday, we pointed out an article that suggested that certain titles in the Xbox collection would be singled out for backwards compatibility – Halo and Halo 2 among them. That article implied that emulation would be involved; code running on the Xbox 360 that handled the calls to the Intel CPU that Xbox games expected to see in the unit. A new article at GamesIndustry.biz, however, says that rather than the box itself emulating Intel hardware, the games will be recompiled to run on the PowerPC chips inside the Xbox 360. Why does this matter to you? In the first case, you’d be able to simply put your existing copies of Halo and Halo 2 into the Xbox 360 – they’d play. In the second case, you’ll be able to PLAY the games on the new machine – but not with your old discs; you’d have to buy the new, recompiled versions. Depending on how many Xbox games are made to be compatible with the new machine (and how many you decided you couldn’t live without), you could be spending a fortune to replace games you already have. If this turns out to be true, the ‘backwards compatibility’ claim goes out the window – yes, you’ll be able to play older games on your new Xbox 360 – but not the versions you have; you STILL have to buy new copies. Here’s hoping GI got it wrong. Thanks, 3Suns. Update: Eep, it looks like 3Suns posted it on the forum as well – so go chime in with your own opinion!

Halo popped up in yet another webcomic yesterday – 6X9 College looked at its ability to suck your concentration right down. Thanks, Elizar.

Captain Spark posted another 30-plus dialogue snippets today, this time all from Sargeant Stacker. You can find them on his website, or in our Dialogue Databank. That man is pretty full of himself! (Stacker, not Spark.)

Whee! Bluestone whipped up a very pretty Flash montage showing all the HBO Helljumpers (and their special talents – or whatever). You can find it in this forum post on the HBO Clan forums. You can also comment on it in this thread.

Gah. You want a lot of desktop choices? We got a lot of desktop choices for you, in our Wallpaper section today. 71 of them, in fact – or almost 90 if you count variants. I’m praying right now for the safety of the server. (You can use this link, instead, if you’d like to look at 9 at a time, instead of all 71 thumbs at once; just remember to use the ‘next’ nav arrow at the top to see the rest.) It’s insane how much I let stuff build up – but at least for the day, it’s cleared out! If you submitted a Wallpaper in the past month, it’s either in here, or it didn’t meet our hosting guidelines.

Eight new pieces for you in the Fan Fiction section – including a story by someone who usually submits artwork to us, instead of words. Check ’em all out! (Just clearing queues before I leave for E3…)

MarkHawk is broke, and looking to make up a little of the cash he needs by auctioning off a pair of Civilian Warthog action figures and a giant promotional poster. You can find the forum post here, and the eBay auction here. Not a bad starting price for a pair of extremely rare hogs and a poster!

I’m thinkin’… that’s Stuntmutt behind the wheel in today’s One One Se7en. Could be wrong, of course.

Gah – I almost forgot that I’d submitted the Going Nowhere Fast Highlight Reel to archive.org! You can grab all four flavors (high and medium res, WMP9 and QT) from their download page; we haven’t run out of bandwidth on other links yet, but it’s always nice to have a really large pipe at your disposal. (Could use a review or two, as well, to keep from looking so lonely…)

Microsoft promised to announce whether the Xbox 360 would be backwards-compatible this Monday – and they kept their word. The answer is yes – but only for a limited number of titles. (Emulation will be required.) They haven’t released a full list – but according to Newsday (in an article about the Playstation 3), David Hufford, Xbox group product manager, specifically included both Halo and Halo 2. Good news! Thanks to a bunch of people – first heads-up came from Fear Of Falling.

Dennis Powers points out an update to a recent news post we put up – the Zelda Ocarina of Time mod for Halo CE is coming along nicely, and in fact has released a video flythrough of the levels they’re working on. You can find commentary and download links (WMP9 or QT) in this post at gearboxgamezone.com. Check it out!

trigger119 points out that Fall of the Covenant, his second machinima project, has been posted at halomachinima.com. It’s available in four flavors – high and low-res versions in both WMP9 and QuickTime. (Size ranges from 50 to 100 mb or so.) It’s the story of the final battle between Spartans and the Covenant – and the visuals are quite good. In fact, my only real criticism is that the movement of the entire movie is held hostage to the visuals; battle scenes are prolonged well past their comfort point in the name of arty slow-motion death. This gripe notwithstanding, the hudless filming and great choreography give this film some nice polish! Go watch. There are comment threads set up both on the halomachinima.com forums, and our own.

Whoa, cool. Looks like Xboxyde was first out of the gate with new screenshots of the upcoming map pack maps (I’m sure all the big boys will have copies before the night is over). Check ’em out! Thanks, Recoil.

The Art sections here at HBO have been languishing for FAR too long – I’ve FINALLY cleared out the Miscellaneous Art queue. Beware – there are 64 entries in today’s batch (over 70 if you count variants) – page loading might be rough. I simply didn’t see any options; I’m leaving for E3 in two days, and it was now or never. There are tons of sketches, lots of paintings, modeled stuff, photos of real stuff… it’s an astoundingly large and varied collection. Look at everything – but don’t miss the stuff by Pinkuh, or Paul Davies, or Roger Wilco, or Chris Bryan. (I’m not in any way saying that the only good stuff in this batch came from one of these people. I’m simply saying that with such a huge update, it will be easy to miss things – so these are some to watch out for.) It’s really possible I missed something… so if you submitted miscellaneous art in the last month or two, and it’s not in this update, go ahead and let us know – we’ll look for it. If all goes well, I’ll be doing similar update with Wallpaper tomorrow.

Wonga. If you like montages, swing by Halo2Forum – they started a contest a few weeks ago, and received 135 movie entries, which they’ve narrowed down to 8 finalists. Two of those have already been released on HBO, but the other 6 are new to me – all told, you’re looking at 500 MB of montage goodness. Here’s hoping the bandwidth holds out… thanks, Z.

A note up on Bungie.net warns you that the Halo 2 Game Viewer is undergoing some work, and will be somewhat limited compared to its usual functionality. By next week, a better, more powerful version should be online… please be patient!